Tri-Agency Open Access Policy

The federal granting agencies – Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) – wish to improve access to the results of Agency-funded research, and to increase the dissemination and exchange of research results.

The Tri-Agency has created a policy that requires all grant recipients to ensure any peer-reviewed journal publications arising from Agency-supported research be made freely accessible within 12 months of publication.

For research funded in whole or in part by CIHR, this policy applies to all grants awarded January 1, 2008 and onward.

For research funded in whole or in part by NSERC or SSHRC, this policy applies to all grants awarded May 1, 2015 and onward.

Tri-Agency grant recipients can fulfil the requirements of the policy through one of the following actions:

Depositing their final, peer-reviewed manuscript into an institutional or disciplinary online repository that will make the manuscript freely accessible within 12 months of publication (must be allowed by the journal).

Publishing in a journal that offers immediate open-access or that offers open-access on its website within 12 months.

Some journals require authors to pay article processing charges (which can range from $3 to $5,000) to make manuscripts freely available upon publication. The cost of publishing in open-access journals is an eligible expense under the Use of Grant Funds, so it is recommended that researchers budget for this in their grant applications.

What resources are available at the university?

The Campus Library supports open-access by encouraging faculty to deposit the results of their research in e-scholar, the university’s institutional repository. E-scholar is an open-access repository where faculty and students can upload and preserve their research. Researchers publish in the journal of their choosing, then deposit a copy of their final, peer-reviewed manuscript in the institutional repository. For more information, see instructions for depositing work in e-scholar.

Researchers may also deposit copies of their work in disciplinary repositories. For a comprehensive list of disciplinary repositories, please see OpenDOAR.

To look up publisher policies around paid open-access and archiving in institutional and disciplinary repositories, use SHERPA/RoMEO.

Should faculty choose to publish their work in an open-access journal, please note that the Library does not pay for or subsidize article-processing charges for open-access publications.